GKE solve end user experience and operational challenges to deliver it

26 min 07 sec: Edge IT replaces what is On-Premises IT

Bullish on the future with Edge computing

27 min 27 sec: Who delivers control plane for edge?

Recommends Open Source in control plan

28 min 29 sec: Current tech hides the infrastructure problems

Someone still has to deal with the physical hardware

30 min 53 sec: Commercial driver for rapid Edge adoption

32 min 20 sec: CloudOps building software / next generation of BSS or OSS for telco

Meet the needs of the cloud provider for flexibility in generating services with the ability to change the service backend provider

Amazon is the new Win32

38 min 07 sec: Can customers install their own software? Will people buy software anymore?

Compare payment models from Salesforce and Slack

Google allowing customers to run their technology themselves of allow Google to manage it for you

40 min 43 sec: Wrap-Up

Podcast Guest: Ian Rae, CEO and Founder CloudOps

Ian Rae is the founder and CEO of CloudOps, a cloud computing consulting firm that provides multi-cloud solutions for software companies, enterprises and telecommunications providers. Ian is also the founder of cloud.ca, a Canadian cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) focused on data residency, privacy and security requirements. He is a partner at Year One Labs, a lean startup incubator, and is the founder of the Centre cloud.ca in Montreal. Prior to clouds, Ian was responsible for engineering at Coradiant, a leader in application performance management.

Mr. Boudreau is a 20 year veteran of the Digital, Telecom and Cable TV industries. From modest beginnings of one of the first cable broadband ISPs in Canada to the fast paced technology hub of Silicon Valley, Yves joined ERICSSON in 2011 as Vice President of Technical Sales Support and most recently has accepted a position as the VP of Partnerships and Ecosystem Strategy for the ERICSSON Unified Delivery Network. Previously, Mr. Boudreau has worked in R&D, Systems Engineering & Business Development for companies such as Com21 Inc., ARRIS Group (Cable), Imagine Communication (Video Compression) and Verivue Inc. (CDN). Yves now resides in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife Josée and 3 children. Mr. Boudreau completed his undergraduate studies in Commerce @ Laurentian University and graduate studies in Information Technology Management @ Athabasca University. Yves currently also serves on the Board of Director of the Streaming Video Alliance (www.streamingvideoalliance.org)

Note: OpenStack voting is limited to community members – if you registered by the deadline, you will receive your unique ballot by email. You have 8 votes to distribute as you see fit.

I believe open infrastructure software is essential for our IT future.

Open source has been a critical platform for innovation and creating commercial value for our entire industry; however, we have to deliberately foster communities for open source activities that connect creators, users and sponsors. OpenStack has built exactly that for people interested in infrastructure and that is why I am excited to run for the Foundation Board again.

OpenStack is at a critical juncture in transitioning from a code focus to a community focus.

We must allow the OpenStack code to consolidate around a simple mission while the community explores adjacent spaces. It will be a confusing and challenging transition because we’ll have to create new spaces that leave part of the code behind – what we’d call the Innovator’s Dilemma inside of a single company. And, I don’t think OpenStack has a lot of time to figure this out.

That change requires both strong and collaborative leadership by people who know the community but are not too immersed in the code.

I am seeking community support for my return to the OpenStack Foundation Board. In the two years since I was on the board, I’ve worked in the Kubernetes community to support operators. While on the board, I fought hard to deliver testable interoperability (DefCore) and against expanding the project focus (Big Tent). As a start-up and open source founder, I bring a critical commercial balance to a community that is too easily dominated by large vendor interests.

Re-elected or not, I’m a committed member of the OpenStack community who is enthusiastically supporting the new initiatives by the Foundation. I believe strongly that our industry needs to sponsor and support open infrastructure. I also believe that dominate place for OpenStack IaaS code has changed and we also need to focus those efforts to be highly collaborative.

OpenStack cannot keep starting with “use our code” – we have to start with “let’s understand the challenges.” That’s how we’ll keep building an strong open infrastructure community.

If these ideas resonate with you, then please consider supporting me for the OpenStack board. If they don’t, please vote anyway! There are great candidates on the ballot again and voting supports the community.

Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, Edge Computing, and DevOps. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet RackN (@rackngo)

Edge computing, in the context of IoT, is the idea that you can actually do some of the computational work required by a system close to the endpoints instead of in a cloud or a data center. The intent is to minimize latency, which, according to Renaud, means that it’s going to be a hot trend in certain kinds of industrial IoT application.

DevOps — a term used to refer to the integration of software developers and operations teams — continues to spread like wildfire throughout the open networking ecosystem. The main idea behind DevOps is that by breaking down barriers between these two departments, market applications can be delivered faster with lower costs and better quality. Nevertheless, for all the advantages attached to DevOps, it is still a budding concept since it is primarily concerned with re-aligning the workforce with a variety of tools. The following, therefore, is a list of DevOps trends to keep an eye out for.

Our architectural plans for Digital Rebar are beyond big – they are for massive distributed scale. Not up, but out. We are designing for the case where we have common automation content packages distributed over 100,000 stand-alone sites (think 5G cell towers) that are not synchronously managed. In that case, there will be version drift between the endpoints and content. For example, we may need to patch an installation script quickly over a whole fleet but want to upgrade the endpoints more slowly.

Yesterday, AWS confirmed that it actually uses physical servers to run its cloud infrastructure and, gasp, no one was surprised. The actual news about the i3.metal instances by AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr shows that bare metal is being treated as just another AMI managed instance type (see also Geekwire, Techcrunch, Venture Beat). For AWS users, there’s no drama here because it’s an incremental add to processes they are already know well.

We are actively looking for feedback from customers and technologists before general availability of both RackN and the Terraform plug-in. It takes just a few minutes to get started and we offer direct engineering engagement on our community slack channel. Get started now by providing your email on our registration pagey so we can provide you all the necessary links.

I love great conversations about technology – especially ones where the answer is not very neatly settled into winners and losers (which is ALL of them in IT). I’m excited that RackN has (re)launched the L8ist Sh9y (aka Latest Shiny) podcast around this exact theme.

Please check out the deep and thoughtful discussion I just had with Mark Thiele (notes) of Apcera where we covered Mark’s thought on why public cloud will be under 20% of IT and culture issues head on.

I’m investing in these Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) discussions because I believe operations (and by extension DevOps) is facing a significant challenge in keeping up with development tooling. The links below have been getting a lot of interest on twitter and driving some good discussion.

Addressing this Ops debt is our primary mission at my company, RackN: we believe that integrated system level tooling is required. We also believe that new tools should not disrupt environments so we work very hard to adapt to requirements of individual sites.

SRE is urgent because it provides a pragmatic path and rationale for investment.

Even if you don’t agree with Google’s term or all their practices, I think fundamental concepts of system thinking, status/pay, automation investment and developer collaboration are essential. It should come as no surprise that these are all Lean/DevOps concepts; however, SRE has the pragmatic side of being a job function.

Here are some recent relevant discussions I’ve been having about SREs with links to both the audio and my text show notes.

TL;DR: infrastructure operations is hard and we need to do a lot more to make these systems widely accessible, easy to sustain and lower risk. We’re discussing these topics on twitter…please join in. Themes include “do we really have consensus and will to act” and “already a solved problem” and “this hurts OpenStack in the end.”

It’s essential to solve these problems in an open way so that we can work together as a community of operators.

It feels like developers are quick to rally around open platforms and tools while operators tend to be tightly coupled to vendor solutions because operational work is tightly coupled to infrastructure. From that perspective, I’m been very involved in OpenStack and Kubernetes open source infrastructure platforms because I believe the create communities where we can work together.

This week, I posted connected items on VMblog and RackN that layout a position where we bring together these communities.

Of course, I do have a vested interest here. Our open underlay automation platform, Digital Rebar, was designed to address a missing layer of physical and hybrid automation under both of these projects. We want to help accelerate these technologies by helping deliver shared best practices via software. The stack is additive – let’s build it together.

I’m very interested in hearing from you about these ideas here or in the context of the individual posts. Thanks!